


hard vocabulary (terrible softness)

by BlackcatNamedlucky



Series: War Stories [3]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Language, Mentions of Racism, Mentions of Suicide, Mentions of Violence, i dont know what this is, i kinda just wanted to prove to myself that i could actually finish something, its about the vietnam war and the like twenty year period after that so, rated teen and up for:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 16:50:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17605172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackcatNamedlucky/pseuds/BlackcatNamedlucky
Summary: The picture shows a young man in jungle fatigues, a crooked grin on his face. His arm is slung around a shorter man standing next to him. Neither of them are older than 21.





	hard vocabulary (terrible softness)

_The photograph is old, the edges are curling and yellowed. The subject is a young man, 19 or 20, dressed in a military uniform. The hat is crooked on his head. He looks straight at the camera, not smiling, a cold look in his eyes._

Alec Lightwood is 19 years old when he gets drafted into the Vietnam War.

It’s 1964 and America doesn’t yet know they’re fighting a losing battle.

(Even later in the decade, when they know, they won’t care, won’t do anything to stop the tide of blood flowing from the bodies of Americans and Viets alike. Innocent blood. Young blood, too young. Mothers are sending their children to fight for honor that doesn’t exist, and what other choice do they have? To say no? To flee? Draft-dodgers are among the worst the country has to offer, everyone knows this.)

He’s a healthy boy. Athletic. A leader. His father assures him he’ll make command in no time. His mother weeps behind closed doors.

He’s a boy.

He was supposed to go to college this fall, not Fort Benning. He would have been studying medicine by 1969, not limping off a plane, hand on the shoulder of another wounded to keep steady.

Behind them are a parade of pine boxes draped in American flags.

###

The war trudges on with the men, slow and weary and unfeeling. Alec is a combat medic now. His men have taken to calling him “Doc Holliday” because of his uncanny accuracy with their standard issue M-16s, as well as the various non-issue weaponry they carry (from necessity or superstition, though sometimes he can’t tell the difference between the two).

After his second tour Alec gets promoted to sergeant first class. The title weighs heavy on his shoulders. It comes too fast, too many men are dying, and too many have to take leadership too young in their careers. Alec deals with the responsibility with grace, likening it to helping his mother raise his siblings as a desperate attempt to keep sane. They’re your children, he tells himself, keep them in line. Keep them alive. Many of the men he leads are older than him. He’s scared most of the time, but he doesn’t let it show. He knows his men are scared most of the time, too. Knows how fragile all their minds are. They have to harden up, have to pretend like nothing around them affects them, certainly not as deeply as it does. If the facade falls, they’ll never be able to rebuild it.

They go through shit. Most of the time it’s literal, too. There’s no reason for this. They’ve known this on the front lines from the beginning. It’s all political bullshit and misplaced American pride.

Most of them are supposed to go home in three weeks. All of them will go home in one. None of them will be in one piece. Some will be buried in empty caskets. Some in pieces. Some in sixty years when the Agent Orange gets to their lungs. Some in closed casket funerals because half of their face was blown off with a .38 caliber alone in their bedroom.

They at least keep the dignity of returning before the American people spit in their faces for fighting a war they never asked to join.

-

 _The man in the picture looks older than his years. His eyes tell a story of horror, of scenes no man woman or child should have to see. He stands in a line with four other men, the side of his face and the dark fatiugues he wears are soaked with his own blood._  
SFC Lightwood is 24 years old when he comes home from the war.

He doesn’t feel like a man anymore.

He doesn’t feel.

(They call it “combat fatigue” but it’s more than fatigue. It’s emptiness. It’s a darkness where his mind used to be and an empty ribcage surrounding the cavity that used to contain his heart. Later, doctors will call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, they’ll give it symptoms and a diagnosis and medications and it will be too late for too many. Alec won’t be one of them. He’ll keep a loaded Smith and Wesson pistol in the drawer of his bedside table but he says he’s too much of a coward to go through with anything. Over time he’ll forget that excuse and remember how to live again. Over time.)

He’s crippled. There’s a bandage over the side of his face where an eye used to be and a hundred stitches run up the outside of his right calf. He’ll have to learn how to balance again.

His mother and sister are there to pick him up, what’s left of his platoon see him off. They’ll keep contact, when they can. They’d lost too much family already to not.

His brother is dead from the same war. His father too. They don’t hurt as much as the men he couldn’t save.

###

He lives in his sisters guest room for the first few months, to get back on his feet. Her husband looks at him with more pity than she does. He hates it. He doesn’t need their pity, doesn’t want it. It makes him feel useless.

The VA is no help, but there’s no surprise there. He re-applies to NYU and gets accepted, feels awkward in a classroom full of naive, innocent 17 and 18 year olds. The teachers have to reserve a seat in the back by the doors for him and he hates it, hates being so weak that he can’t even have children at his back or he’ll go crazy. His sister says it’ll just take time, he’ll feel normal again, feel better, but she doesn’t know. She’s never known what it feels like to be watched all the time. Can’t sleep without feeling watched, can’t eat, can’t take a shit. She doesn’t know, can’t say the feeling will ever fade. But still, he takes some kind of solace in her words.

It doesn’t take time. It never really goes away, not through college, not through the rest of his adult life, not when he’s fucking geriatric. But it stops feeling like weakness. After time he looks at it as something of a...side effect. He doesn’t feel fragile anymore. He learns how to make people’s pity feel less degrading. He learns how to hear “thank you for your service” without wanting to break down.

-

_The picture shows two men sitting next to each other, their shoulders brushing. They're looking at each other, smiling in a way that only people who share a world to themselves can. There's no question about their happiness._

Alexander is 25 when he falls in love for the first time.

They meet at a march, under a banner that reads Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He’s handsome, and kind, and looks at Alec with a warmth that no one else has before.

(Later he’ll tell him about the men in his platoon who distrusted him, thought he was a double agent no matter how many times he’d protested that he wasn’t Vietnamese. “You’re all the same in this war,” one had told him. Alec’s blood would boil but he wouldn’t let it show. That wouldn’t help anything.)

He holds a sign that reads “Proud American, Ashamed Veteran”, Alec’s own reads “Lyndon B Johnson killed more than Ho Chi Minh”. His dog tags glint in the early October sun, striking against his dark jungle fatigues.

He wasn’t supposed to be a soldier either. He was a grunt. A medic, like Alec, but he never made it past PFC.

He’d only made it back from the war a year before Alec had. When they meet he says he wants to go into politics, wants to try and change the bullshit in their country.

###

They move in together only a couple months into dating. He tells his sister only vague details of their relationship, his mom doesn’t even know he’s with someone. He worries at first that it might be too soon, but they’re happy. They feel safe around each other in ways that they can’t feel safe around anyone else anymore.

Most nights, at least for the first few years, at least one of them will wake up from a nightmare, unable to recognize even the bed they lay in. Neither of them will be able to fall asleep again on nights like this. Their kitchen table will see more of them than their bed. They’ll sit, cradling mugs of coffee, damn the fact that they need to be at work or class the next morning, taking comfort in the other’s presence.

It’s easier to go to class on three hours of sleep and a whole pot of coffee than it is to face the nightmares, the memories of men dying in front of you replaying over and over and reminding you how powerless you were to stop it.

-

_The photograph is of two men standing in a courtroom. They're both wearing suits. They face someone who's not in the picture. Their hands are clutched tightly._

They make it through anyways. Magnus gets his law degree and runs for mayor in 1978. Alec teases him about being New York City’s own Harvey Milk during his campaign. It’s funny until Milk gets shot five times.

Alec gets his medical degree in 1980, but none of his schooling could have prepared him for the ensuing years. The generation of men who would die without the President of the United States even saying the name of their disease.

The world changes, however slowly, it changes. Most of the time it feels like they take one step forward and two steps back, but there’s progress. Alec gets married in his late sixties when it’s finally legal. It’s a courthouse affair, they’re too tired for a fancy ceremony. And besides, there’s no telling whether the ruling would be overturned, but too many of their friends died before this, too many of them denied the right to see their lovers laid to rest for them to give up this opportunity that they were lucky enough to see.

Eventually, the nightmares will give way to restful sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Hiiii I know I haven't updated broken halos in like half a year (if anyone is even still reading that) I just. haven't been able to write.  
> title is taken from a line in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"  
> read that for a class, I'm. attemping to process it.


End file.
